New research from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Rockefeller University suggests that newly discovered commonalities may open the door to “engineered” gut flora that can have therapeutically beneficial effects on disease. “The bacterial ligands they created turned out to be almost identical structurally to the human ligands,” said Louis Cohen, MD, assistant professor of medicine and gastroenterology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Among the advantages of working with bacteria, says Dr. Cohen, who spent five years in Dr. Brady's lab as part of Rockefeller's Clinical Scholars Program, is that their genes are easier to manipulate than human genes and much is already known about them. "All the genes for all the bacteria inside of us have been sequenced at some point," he said.